Most Read: This Month

The consensus among economic (but not maritime) historians that maritime technology was more or less stagnant for 300 years until iron steamships appeared in the mid-19th century is largely based on indirect measures, such as changes in the cost of shipping freight or the length of voyages. This column instead looks directly at how the speed of ships in different winds improved over time. The speed of British ships rose by around half between 1750 and 1830 (albeit from a low base) thanks to innovations like the copper plating of hulls and the move from wooden to iron joints and bolts.

Cryptocurrencies are supposedly a new and superior form of money and investments – the way of the future. The author of this column, however, does not see the point of cryptocurrencies, finding them no better than existing fiat money or good investments.

Chinese banks have continued to expand rapidly both domestically and abroad. Together, they constitute the largest banking sector in the world by far. This column places the Chinese banking system in a global context. Although very small relative to their domestic claims, Chinese banks’ foreign claims are substantial for many borrower countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean in particular. Many of these banking connections are related to Chinese outward foreign direct investment, with fewer related to trade linkages.

The availability of large datasets has sparked interest in predictive models with many possible predictors. Using six examples of data from macroeconomics, microeconomics, and finance, this column argues that it is not usually possible to identify sparse models by selecting a handful of predictors from these larger pools. The idea that economic data are informative enough to identify sparse predictive models might be an illusion.

Persistent poverty, economic decay and lack of opportunities cause discontent in declining regions, while policymakers reason that successful agglomeration economies drive economic dynamism, and that regeneration has failed. This column argues that this disconnect has led many of these ‘places that don’t matter’ to revolt in a wave of political populism with strong territorial, rather than social, foundations. Better territorial development policies are needed that tap potential and provide opportunities to those people living in the places that ‘don’t matter’.

Economists disagree on the macroeconomic role of negative interest rates. This column describes how, due to an apparent zero lower bound on deposit rates, negative policy rates have so far had very limited impact on the deposit rates faced by households and firms, and this lower bound on the deposit rate seems to be causing a decline in pass-through to lending rates as well. Negative interest rates thus appear ineffective in stimulating aggregate demand.

Following the post-financial crisis recession, the UK and other high-income countries have experienced slow growth and stagnant productivity, along with both low inflation and, more recently, low unemployment. This column introduces an intuitive macroeconomic model that helps explain this puzzling combination.

The majority of obese adults are now found in developing countries This column presents new evidence on the effects of trade on obesity in Mexico. The results indicate that across Mexican states, a one standard deviation increase in the unhealthy share of food imports from the US increases the likelihood of individuals being obese by about 5 percentage points. As developing countries around the world open up their food markets to industrialised countries, they may be accelerating their ongoing nutrition transition and imposing high future costs on their health systems.

Research on long-run economic development has relied heavily on the database compiled by Angus Maddison. This column presents a new version of the Maddison Project Database based on historical growth data, but also incorporating historical cross-country income comparisons. The revisions shed new light on patterns of long-term development and cross-country income convergence.

Many economists have suggested that slowing technical innovation is behind the secular stagnation and slowdown in total factor productivity growth that have plagued many advanced economies since the Global Crisis. This column argues that the recent rise of the intangible economy could play an important role. An assessment of measurement trends and the properties of intangible investment across the globe suggests that total factor productivity growth will continue to be low until governments design the institutions an intangible economy needs, and until its commercial, legal, and ethical norms are worked out.

Urban concentration is typically deemed to lead to greater national economic growth. This column challenges this view, using an original dataset covering 68 countries over the past three decades. Urban concentration levels have decreased or remained stable on average, though these averages hide widely diverging trends across countries. Although concentration has been beneficial for high-income countries, this hasn’t been the case for for developing countries.

The most accurate way to determine how people respond to an economic policy is to observe how they did in fact respond to that policy, but this approach is not always possible. This column uses a 2008 tax rebate in the US to compare the traditional revealed preference approach and a reported preference approach where people are simply asked how they would, or did, behave. The results suggest that reported spending data are valuable in predicting behaviour and in estimating population aggregates, but are not sufficiently accurate to provide reliable quantitative measurements of household-level spending responses.

The proliferation of independent fiscal councils raises the question as to how toothless watchdogs can effectively prevent harmful policies. Even though these councils do not control any policy lever, high hopes rest in their ability to foster more stabilising and financially responsible fiscal policies. Are such hopes justified considering sketchy theory and limited evidence? What factors seem to make certain councils more effective than others? And what political conditions are conducive to establishing effective institutions? This column introduces some of the key issues related to the effectiveness of independent fiscal councils and discussed in a new eBook.

The role of the monetary policy decisions in influencing markets and economies has increased sharply over the past 30 years. A new VoxEU eBook presents the state of the art of the economics and politics of modern monetary policy governance as a story of two tales: on the one side, the tale of how monetary policy decisions are reached; on the other side, the tale of how such decisions can influence the shape of the markets via central banks’ communication policies.

A new wave of foreign direct investment has swept sub-Saharan African countries, with inflows becoming more diversified both geographically and sectorally. This column presents an analysis that shows a high degree of complementarity between involvement in global value chains and FDI. Policies supporting the entry and upgrading of countries in such chains – especially via a strong institutional setting and a well-educated labour force – can help maximise the spillovers from foreign investment.

Risk weights define each bank's minimum capital requirements, but many doubt the comparability of the risk weights that banks report. This column quantifies the variability of these weights across banks, and finds that the country where a bank is headquartered creates statistically significant and economically important differences. Model output floors, as recently agreed upon by the Basel Committee, would reduce this unintended risk weight heterogeneity.

Access to existing knowledge fuels basic scientific progress and is key to the development of new technologies. This column studies how the decline in scientific cooperation that occurred during and after WWI affected science and innovation. The interruption of international knowledge flows led to stark declines in both the volume and quality of scientific production. This points to the merits of opening up access to scientific journals and of discerning what constitutes frontier research.

In international macroeconomics, it is typically assumed that the exchange rate between two trading partners matters most for trade prices, quantities, and terms of trade. This column presents evidence supporting an alternate view – that a country’s exchange rate relative to the US dollar is most important. This is because invoicing in dollars is common, even when the US is not part of a transaction. The findings have important implications for the conduct of monetary and exchange rate policies.

Since 1973, there has been divergence between labour productivity and the typical worker’s pay in the US as productivity has continued to grow strongly and growth in average compensation has slowed substantially. This column explores the causes and implications of this trend. Productivity growth appears to have continued to push workers’ wages up, with other factors to blame for the divergence. The evidence casts doubt on the idea that rapid technological progress is the primary driver here, suggesting rather that institutional and structural factors are to blame.

The basic ingredients of the policy prescriptions in response to the euro area debt crisis were quite similar across Southern Europe. This column explores the economic, political, and institutional factors that differentially affected the success of these prescriptions from country to country. Policy timing and sequencing, the balance between fiscal consolidation and structural reforms, and external constraints all play crucial roles. Future reform programmes should be calibrated to the distinct economic, social, and political features of targeted countries.

A growing number of jurisdictions have adopted taxes on sugary drinks to help combat excessive sugar consumption. This column simulates the introduction of a volumetric tax on sugary soda in Britain to examine how well targeted such taxes are. The simulated tax leads young people to reduce the amount of sugar they purchase via soda by around 80% more than the average consumer, but is less effective at targeting people with a high-sugar diet.

Understanding the distributional consequences of fiscal adjustment measures is important for equity, but also to ensure the sustainability of the measures. This column shows that fiscal adjustments increase inequality, including through unemployment. Spending-based adjustments worsen inequality more significantly than tax-based adjustments. Progressive taxation and targeted social benefits and subsidies introduced in the context of a broader decline in spending can help offset some of the distributional impact of fiscal adjustments.

Current stress testing of banks is focused on the resiliency of individual banks to exogenous shocks. This column describes how the next generation of macroprudential stress tests aim to capture the endogenous nature of systemic risk caused by the interaction of all the institutions and markets making up the financial system. This will lead to a better policy mix aimed at preserving financial stability.

Over recent decades houses have become increasingly expensive in the UK, leading to what is routinely described as a ‘housing crisis’. This column assesses whether, over the long term, the UK experience is so unusual and explores the underlying forces at work. Two key elasticities and one technological factor are highlighted as being central to the story and will determine what happens over the next 50 years.

A cornerstone of new bank resolution policies across the world is the introduction of bail-ins to redistribute the costs of bank failures from taxpayers to bank creditors. This column uses the bail-in of two banks in Cyprus to examine how bank depositors react to this way of resolving a crisis. In the short run, customers who experienced deposit or bond bail-ins increased their holdings of cash and reduced deposits, while those who faced only an equity bail-in did not change their behaviour. In the medium run, confidence in the banking system among all depositors remained low.

Unemployment insurance is compulsory in almost all countries, with no choice for workers over the level of coverage. But why restrict choice if it can improve the targeting of individuals who value the insurance the most? This column uses evidence from Sweden to examine whether the issue of adverse selection justifies a universal mandate for unemployment insurance. Workers who purchased more generous unemployment insurance were more than twice as likely to be unemployed in the following year. A universal mandate combats such adverse selection, but forces workers to buy insurance even when insurance costs are higher than the value they assign to it.

The outlook for the euro area economy depends to a large extent on whether the impact of the crisis will turn out to be permanent or transitory. This column attempts to chart out the path ahead, starting from what different narratives of the 'atypical recovery' imply about the further trajectory of GDP and inflation. In view of remaining slack, and barring an exogenous shock or policy mistakes, there is scope for solid GDP growth above potential for some time. The factors that should eventually drive an increase in core inflation are gaining force, but only gradually. The current supportive policy mix is thus appropriate for the euro area as a whole, but reforms that raise productivity and increase the economy's resilience to shocks should be accelerated.

On 22 January 2018, President Trump imposed safeguard duties on imported washing machines and solar panels and cells. This column analyses import surges into the US from 2006 to 2016 to put these tariff increases in perspective. Using a simple, theory-inspired method for identifying surges, it finds that during 2014-6 a category of manufactured good in the US had a one-in-32 chance of witnessing an import surge each year. US import surges aren’t concentrated in sectors where China has severe excess capacity either.

International economic dispute settlement is under increased scrutiny. How are decisions made about the ‘fairness’ of national or foreign policies? How are damages to be paid by governments to private investors calculated? This column introduces a book with contributions from academics and practitioners that explore whether economists can be of use in addressing these and other contentious questions in international trade and investor–state disputes.

The availability of fiscal space has been at the centre of recent debates on the effective use of fiscal policy. This column introduces a new cross-country database of fiscal space indicators and applies it to the analysis of the evolution of fiscal space over the past quarter century and during oil price plunges. Fiscal space has weakened materially in many emerging and developing economies since the Global Crisis. Fiscal space tends to deteriorate in energy-exporting emerging and developing economies during oil price plunges but later improves, often because of procyclical fiscal tightening.

Firms develop inter-firm networks throughout their lifecycles, continually adding and dropping trading partners. This column examines the role that the dynamics of these networks play in firm growth. The findings point to the importance of searching for potential trading partners and learning match-specific productivity for younger firms. Surviving older firms, in contrast, tend to enjoy a stable set of customers and suppliers to keep their operations.

There has been limited research on how groups’ collective reputations are affected by the misbehaviour of individual members. This column uses the Volkswagen emissions scandal as a natural experiment to explore group reputation externalities. German auto manufacturers that weren’t implicated in the scandal suffered significant declines in sales, stock returns, and public sentiment in the US. Volkswagen’s malfeasance appeared to materially harm the group reputation of German car engineering.

Banks that internationalise can enjoy additional profit opportunities and diversification benefits as national business cycles are not perfectly synchronised. This column uses an international sample of banks in 113 countries during 2000-2015 to show that the relative valuation of international banks from high-income countries rose following the Global Crisis as they experienced lower increases in loan losses, adjusted their international asset allocations, and received generous ‘too-big-to-fail’ subsidies. International banks headquartered in developing countries experienced no such revaluation following the crisis.

Late last year, the Basel Committee decided to maintain the status quo regarding regulation of banks’ sovereign debt holdings. This column summarises the reasons to be cautious of stricter regulation of banks’ sovereign exposures. Theory and experience suggest small net benefits from such a reform, with possible increases in tail risks. The best instrument to tackle the problem is not microprudential regulation, but sounder public finances and the completion of the banking union.

Retirement ages in industrialised countries have been rising over the last three decades as more people work later into their lives. This column focuses on Germany, examining this trend and the contributing factors. Despite comparable trends in health, educational attainment, and spouse’s labour force participation, these three factors do not appear to explain the rise in retirement age. Instead, changes to public pension rules seem to be the key driver.

Ageing societies and the increase in female labour force participation are putting pressure on governments to take a more active role in caring for the elderly. Using European and US data, this column investigates the responses of families to long-term care policy. The results suggest that care arrangements are strongly influenced by policy, and highlight the importance of accounting for informal care when evaluating reform proposals.

European labour force participation has increased over recent decades, fuelled in large part by increased female labour participation, improvements in education levels, and socioeconomic factors. This column explores whether this trend will continue, or whether we will see a decline similar to that in the US. Results indicate that while Europe’s labour participation is not on the verge of a reversal, targeted policies will need to take over from socio-educational developments in driving further growth.

The study of global value chains has become increasingly relevant as production becomes more and more fragmented across countries. This column uses evidence from Japan to evaluate recent theories that such chains have caused some of the country’s industries to become less competitive. The findings suggest that considering production for exports and domestic sales separately may provide a more complete picture of firm heterogeneity within industries, and a more complete picture of interconnected countries at the industry level.

While there is consensus that structural reforms can increase growth, there is also a fear that certain reforms can exacerbate inequality. This column argues – based on a dataset covering financial, institutional, and real sector reforms – that certain reforms do indeed increase inequality but despite this, the net effect on growth remains positive.

For regional firms to survive, they need to find export markets using wholesalers as intermediaries. This column uses a dataset of export activity in Japan to show that this type of indirect export activity occurs predominantly from metropolitan areas, with the probability of direct exports negatively correlated with the distance between manufacturer and wholesaler. Wholesaler productivity (though not manufacturer productivity) was correlated with the probability of these indirect exports, suggesting that wholesalers search for suitable manufacturers, but not vice versa.

Large multilateral organisations like WHO and the UN rely heavily on average income data in determining eligibility for, and the allocation of, development assistance for health. This column tests this paradigm by analysing the determinants of health outcomes for 99 countries. A country’s epidemiological surroundings, poverty gap, and institutional capacity appear to be much better predictors of health outcomes than gross national income. These findings suggest alternative metrics that could be leveraged in allocating development assistance for health.

Researchers often pick a random or a directed search model based on convenience and theoretical implications, but distinguishing between the two is important as many labour market regulations may be welfare-improving under random search, but not under directed search. This column uses data from Chile to show that job-seekers respond to information posted by employers, suggesting that policy design should consider the prescriptions of directed search models. However, the evidence also shows that relevant features of these markets are not well captured by existing models.

Measuring the returns to search engine marketing accurately is difficult, but one study suggested that if eBay were to suspend its branded search ads, the volume of traffic to the site would remain virtually unchanged. Based on a field test involving a website for automotive information in the US, this column argues that money spent on search engine marketing by smaller brands may be more effective than previously documented. Only about half of the traffic normally flowing through branded search ads still flowed to the site when it relied only on organic search links.

Europe’s new framework for resolving banks includes a ‘bail-in’ mechanism which aims to ensure that banks’ shareholders and creditors pay their share of costs, and which was first used to resolve the 2013 banking crisis in Cyprus. This column, written by the economist who was the country’s central bank governor at the time, examines the unintended consequences of the bail-in, which have proved more toxic than could ever have been imagined, and not just in Cyprus. Several euro area central banks and their governors have found themselves in the eye of political and legal storms when taking actions to resolve failing banks and/or restore stability in their banking systems.

Investment is shifting from tangible physical assets to intangible goods like software, data, and R&D. This column analyses the impact of this shift on the structure of firm financing. The financial system’s shift from public to private equity is, on the whole, an encouraging reflection of its response to the changing needs of the economy.